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LOS ANGELES — Lawyers for convicted assassin Sirhan Sirhan said in new legal papers that he was manipulated by a seductive girl in a mind control plot to shoot Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and his bullets did not kill the presidential candidate.

The documents filed this week in federal court and obtained by The Associated Press detail extensive interviews with Sirhan during the past three years, some done while he was under hypnosis.

The papers point to a mysterious girl in a polka dot dress as the controller who led Sirhan to fire a gun in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel.

But the documents suggest a second person shot and killed Kennedy while using Sirhan as a diversion.

For the first time, Sirhan said under hypnosis that on a cue from the girl he went into “range mode’’ believing he was at a firing range and seeing circles with targets in front of his eyes.

“I thought that I was at the range more than I was actually shooting at any person, let alone Bobby Kennedy,’’ Sirhan was quoted as saying during interviews with Daniel Brown, a Harvard University professor and specialist in trauma memory and hypnosis.

He interviewed Sirhan for 60 hours with and without hypnosis, according to the legal brief.

Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney, said prosecutors were unaware of the legal filing and could not comment.

The story of the girl has been a lingering theme in accounts of the events just after midnight on June 5, 1968, when Kennedy was gunned down in the hotel pantry after claiming victory in the California Democratic presidential primary.

Witnesses talked of seeing such a female running from the hotel shouting, “We shot Kennedy.’’

But she was never identified, and amid the chaos of the scene, descriptions were conflicting.

Through the years, Sirhan has claimed no memory of shooting Kennedy and said in the recent interviews that his presence at the hotel was an accident, not a planned destination.

Under hypnosis, he remembered meeting the girl that night and becoming smitten with her. He said she led him to the pantry.

“I am trying to figure out how to hit on her. . . . That’s all that I can think about,’’ he said in one interview cited in the documents

Brown was hired by Sirhan’s lawyer William F. Pepper.

Pepper’s associate, attorney Laurie Dusek, attended the interviews and Brown said in the documents they both took verbatim notes because prison officials would not let them tape record most of the sessions.

Sirhan maintained in the hypnotic interviews that the mystery girl touched him or “pinched’’ him on the shoulder just before he fired, then spun him around to see people coming through the pantry door.

“Then I was on the target range . . . a flashback to the shooting range . . . I didn’t know that I had a gun,’’ Sirhan said.

Under what Brown called the condition of hypnotic free recall, he said Sirhan remembered seeing the flash of a second gun at the time of the assassination. Without hypnosis, he said, Sirhan could not remember that shot.